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Exposed: Beijing's failure in Tibet
Sydney Morning Herald - May 22, 2009
John Garnaut, Beijing – A scathing new report, perhaps the first of its kind from inside China since Tibet was brutally locked down in March last year, describes how Beijing's efforts to pour rivers of money into Tibet since 1989 to ensure "stability" have been spectacularly counter-productive.
The report, which is controversial for having been written by a group of Beijing scholars, says private-sector jobs went to ethnic Han Chinese from other provinces, and public money flowed into the pockets of a new elite which systematically portrayed community discontent as "separatism".
"They use every opportunity to play the separatism card," says Phun Tshogs Dbang Rjyal, a founder of the Communist Party in Tibet, who is quoted in the report.
"And they will try hard to apportion responsibility on 'overseas hostile forces' because this is the way to consolidate their interests and status and eventually bring them more power and resources."
The fieldwork was conducted by four Peking University journalism students who travelled to Lhasa and a Tibetan region of Gansu province in July.
It was written and recently published on the internet by the Open Constitution Initiative, a non-government organisation run by lawyers and intellectuals in Beijing.
The uprising that embroiled much of the Tibetan plateau from March 14 last year is considered one of the most serious challenges to Communist Party rule since 1949.
The report's existence defies a government propaganda and security blitz that exile groups say has led to hundreds of ethnic Tibetans being killed and thousands being incarcerated.
Authorities have blamed the violence on Tibetan "criminals", "hostile foreign forces" and "the Dalai Lama clique".
Xu Zhiyong, a human rights lawyer who helped prepare the report, said he hoped it would be picked up by Chinese media, but he held little hope that it would influence government officials.
But ethnic Tibetans are nevertheless heartened that a balanced account of the causes of last year's uprising can now exist in China.
"As a Tibetan I feel this report is very important," said Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan poet in Beijing. "This is a rare and treasured report under the current circumstances of one-sided official propaganda."
The report details how Beijing's heavy security and propaganda response further alienated ethnic Tibetans after the uprisings.
Monks, who were seen as "the divine clergy" by Tibetans, were mishandled and subjected to "socialist patriotic education".
Even card-carrying Communist Party members were treated as security threats because of their ethnicity when visiting Beijing during the Olympic Games last year.
"Just because I was a Tibetan... no hotels allowed me in. This made me so angry," says a Tibetan woman called Baima Jizhong quoted in the report.
She was in Beijing to participate in a training session with the central Communist Youth League.
Perhaps most surprisingly to outsiders, the report describes how many Tibetans have fond memories of the first three decades of Communist Party rule.
"The investigation study team found lots of Tibetan families are still hanging Mao's portrait... in their homes," it says. Paradoxically, that vanished after Beijing switched from revolution to reform in the 1970s.
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